This collection is a facsimile reprint of the initial publication
of the Tonson miscellanies (in the first four of which Dryden
played a prominent role as contributor, editorial adviser, and
recruiter of contributors). In 1679 the enterprising young
publisher Jacob Tonson entered into a business relationship with
John Dryden, the most eminent English poet of the late seventeenth
century. This was to last until Dryden's death in 1700, by which
time Tonson was well established as the major English literary
publisher of his day. Jacob Tonson (the Elder) has been called 'the
first modern publisher'. One of the keystones of his publishing
enterprises was the series of verse miscellanies of which the first
editions appeared between 1684 and 1709. Unlike some later
collections, these were not compilations of previously-published
material, but of new work commissioned or collected expressly for
these volumes by Tonson and - until his death - Dryden. As the
label implies, their appeal was partly that of variety: they each
contained many (50-110) mostly short poems in a wide range of
genres, including topical satires, theatrical prologues and
epilogues, songs, personal poems, and especially translations from
the more accessible Latin and Greek classics (see sample contents
lists in Appendix). They achieved immediate success, long-term
popularity, and an extremely influential role in forming the tastes
of readers and the practices of writers. Today, the miscellanies
provide crucial insight into the development of English poetry at
the beginning of the Long Eighteenth Century. Early volumes print
work by such poets as Sir Charles Sedley, Rochester, Aphra Behn,
and Thomas Rymer. The middle volumes see the emergence of a new
generation of younger writers, many of them proteges of Dryden,
including Joseph Addison, William Congreve, and Matthew Prior. The
final volumes include some of the earliest work of Alexander Pope,
Nicholas Rowe, and Jonathan Swift. The miscellanies represent a
wide spectrum of political affiliations, and include work by, and
addressed to, women. The Tonson miscellanies thus provide a unique
decade-by-decade record of the complex transition between the
'Restoration' and 'Augustan' (or more neutrally seventeenth to
eighteenth-century) phases of English literary culture.
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